\section{Educational and synergistic activities} 
\label{sec:edu}
Our project provides exciting research opportunities for both graduate
and undergraduate students, and for meaningful collaborations with a
number of other researchers.  The PIs teaching interests are aligned
with the research topics of this proposal, thus allowing for
significant curriculum development.  In the following, we elaborate on
each of these dimensions of the proposal.

\medskip
\BfPara{Graduate students} This project includes support for at least
one doctoral student at each of the three participating institutions
each year.  It provides the potential for strong dissertation work on
several important topics: locality of information in vaccination
games; the impact of behavioral changes and connection-altering
interactions on contagion control; the design of effective temporal
intervention strategies.  The collaborative nature of the project will
ensure regular interactions among participating students from Computer
Science, Social Sciences, and Epidemiology, and will significantly
enhance the research training experience in each of these disciplines.
Over the last 3 years, Sundaram and Rajaraman have together graduated two women
doctoral students -- Xin Liu and Laura Poplawski -- who have then
taken up positions in leading industry firms (Microsoft and BBN
Technologies), while Vullikanti has graduated Deepti Chafekar, a woman
student currently at Nokia.
We plan to continue our efforts to recruit strong
women and minority graduate students.

\medskip
\BfPara{Undergraduate research} Our theoretical research tasks require
strong graduate-level training in either Computer Science, Economics,
Epidemiology, or Mathematics.  As we have outlined in our research
description, however, our core research will be carried out in close
coordination with carefully designed agent-based simulations.  We
expect that senior undergraduate students will play an active role in
these experimental projects.  Should this proposal be funded, support
for undergraduate students will be requested as an REU supplement.
The PIs have had significant involvement with undergraduate students.
Sundaram supervised an undergraduate research project on locating
parked vehicles using a multi-hop wireless sensor network.  This
project, which has been reported in the Boston Globe \cite{faber06bg},
also won the top award for undergraduate student Nathan Faber at
Northeastern University's annual Research and Scholarship Expo.
Rajaraman has also advised undergraduate students on REU projects
related to sensor networks and scheduling, one of which led to
a research publication~\cite{muthukrishnan+rsg:scheduleFull}.
Reluga has advised several undergraduate students: Ryan Bradley, Galen Lynch,
Geoffrey Gyapong, Natalie Miller, Emily Foglia, Douglas Sullivan, Brendan McVeigh
and Monica Kim. He has also participated in a
Summer REU Program in Mathematical Biology at Penn State.

\medskip
\BfPara{Curriculum development} As mentioned in
Section~\ref{sec:intro}, one of the goals of this project is to give
intellectual unity to the study of contagion by providing a general
framework that includes techniques from percolation theory,
algorithmic game theory, and complex networks.  We plan to incorporate
this collection of techniques in a new graduate-level course on the
``Algorithmic Foundations for Complex Networks''.  We have taught
several courses on topics related to this proposal, including
``Approximation Algorithms'' (Rajaraman), and ``Algorithmic Power
Tools'' (Rajaraman and Sundaram); the latter course covered a wide
range of algorithmic techniques including linear and semi-definite
programming, geometric techniques, algebraic techniques, probabilistic
methods, and game-theoretic analyses.  (Lecture notes for all these
courses are available online from the PIs' homepages.)  In Fall 2009,
Reluga taught a new course intended to introduce Biology students to
the uses of mathematical modeling in medical and biological sciences.
A natural way to enhance the quality of current offerings is by class
projects that simulate the spread of contagion or evaluate the
effectiveness of specific intervention strategies.  Lecture notes for
all the courses and detailed descriptions of all projects will be
publicly available on the web.

\junk{ Co-PI Ravi Sundaram has
  developed a course in wireless security, which is aimed at
  upper-level undergraduate students.  A standard course on Wireless
  networks is in the graduate curriculum.  We plan to enhance the
  curriculum of both of these courses by including research material
  from the section on ad hoc networks.  Co-PI Rajaraman has developed
  a course in Distributed Network Algorithms for senior graduate
  students.  Tutorial for multi-hop networks.  Projects for
  approximation algorithms classes.  }


